The name of Leporello’s killer was never revealed, not least because the sad event set a chain of unexpectedly positive events in motion at the front near Avion. As if the Messiah had fallen, the death of the Scottish soldier led to the start of negotiations and then a Christmas-Eve truce between the companies of the German 93rd Division, the Scottish 92nd Division and the French 26th Brigade. A Scottish priest, Father Donovan, held a midnight Mass for a thousand men, and on Christmas Day they buried all the dead who had long lain uncollected between the trenches. The pipers played Flowers of the Forest at McDermott’s funeral and Huis sang at his friend’s shallow grave; he swore it was the last time he had sung Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
THE TYPHUS SITUATION
The infected feel a growing inner disquiet, which rapidly deepens into a draining sense of despair. At the same time, they are overwhelmed by mental exhaustion. This spreads to the muscles and tendons as well as to all internal organs, not least to the stomach, which rejects all food with revulsion. There is a strong need to sleep, but despite great fatigue, sleep is fitful and shallow, full of fear and not at all refreshing. The infected have severe headaches; their mind is dull and confused, as if wrapped in mists and pervaded with dizziness. They feel an ill-defined pain in all their limbs. There are periodic nosebleeds for no apparent reason. That is how the disease begins.
This introduction describes the state many Belgraders were in when a typhus epidemic broke out towards the end of December 1914. The Serbian papers wrote with undisguised, malicious joy about the mass outbreak of measles in Hungary and cholera in Austria; but the Serbian typhus was passed over in silence. The disease started at the banks of the Danube and the low-lying parts of the city, at the pools and by-channels which collected the water turbid with blood and human decay; the ailing Drina brought these with its waves and infected the already sickly Sava, which in turn passed on the illness to the irresolute and horrified Danube. Weary swamp herons and frogs in the shallows were the first to feel that something was way out of order, but they were unable to carry any warning to the people carousing in cafés and celebrating the second expulsion of the Krauts from Serbia with the same cheerful songs as at the beginning of the Great War.
The first typhus sufferers blamed the café owners and sour wine for their bad and restless sleep and the constant headaches, which didn’t subside from morning till late evening. Then fires were seen, over beyond Bara Venecia; people thought it was Gypsies who had returned to their dugouts and wooden hovels with the liberators and were burning off old rags. But in fact it was health officials silently incinerating the infected clothing of the first victims; they wanted to postpone declaring an epidemic so the enemy wouldn’t find out and exploit the outbreak to their advantage.
At that time, the first people to come down with typhus fell into bed. It was absurd the way they now blamed their wanton and dissolute company for the sad state they were in. Their teeth chattered; black pustules the size of lentils came out on their chests and abdomens. Dizziness became ever more pronounced, and their teeth and gums were covered in a blackish, resinous scum. Even when wails and invocations began to be heard from many houses, there was no official admission that an epidemic of typhus had broken out in Serbia.
So it was that typhus made its way to Belgrade and swept on to Shabac, Smederevo, Loznica, Valyevo, and all the way to Uzhice and the recently liberated territories in the south; it was like a horseman on a furious steed with steaming nostrils, but its pounding hoofs remained unheard even in the deepest silence. The disease spread like a weed in a neglected garden and soon the hospitals were full of typhus cases being tended by nurses of the Serbian Red Cross, who then fell ill themselves. They were treated by doctors of all ranks, who also fell ill. Doctors from Greece and Britain came to the aid of their Serbian colleagues, only to come down with typhus themselves. Disease thus carried off those whom the battles had forgotten.
One small shoe-polish dealer was among those infected with typhus. For Djoka Velkovich, the Great War ended when he inanely directed a last, watery gaze at the calendar for the New Year, on which he saw a Serbian soldier with ‘1915’ on his back crushing an Austrian soldier with ‘1914’ on his chest. The Serb had the resolute countenance of Saint George, victor in the Battles of Cer and Kolubara, while the Austrian gazed up from the ground, like a sordid snake ready to deliver one last desperate bite.
At the twelfth hour, the last breath left the chest of Djoka Velkovich as gently as a feather which drifts off from an empty pillow. It was the New Year 1915 by the Julian calendar.
The same day, by the same calendar, the ‘Iron Duke’ Nicholas Nikolaevich reluctantly celebrated New Year’s Eve at Russian army headquarters. He spoke little, drank little and looked down at his quarrelling generals. He went to bed early and apologized, saying he had a headache.
On New Year’s Eve by the Julian calendar, Sergei Chestukhin and his wife Liza found themselves in Riga, on the north-easternmost stretch of the front. After the time of victory came a time of defeat, but Sergei had managed to buy some Königsberg amber for his Lizochka on the black market, a piece of incomparable beauty with an interned bee in the centre. She turned it in her hands. The Baltic gold gleamed like the honey of that petrified bee, like her copper-bearing hair bathed in the sun. ‘It would have been better if supreme command had given me Marusya for the New Year,’ the heroic nurse said and burst into tears, defiantly wiping those pearls from her cheeks as they rolled from her eyes the colour of sepia.
The greatest German baritone, Hans-Dieter Huis, couldn’t remember how he saw in the New Year 1915. But that was nothing unusual, because many soldiers later couldn’t say where they had been during the celebrations and New Year’s break.
The writer Jean Cocteau returned to Paris on leave. He arrived in the City of Light like a real wartime popinjay: in an ironed and scented uniform with a crimson helmet. Everyone at the Rotonde and the Dôme was meant to see how he had ‘gone to war in style’ in 1914. He couldn’t find Picasso.
Lucien Guirand de Scevola spent New Year’s Eve beside a radio-telegraph. He had read in Le Parisien the same day that wireless telegraphers had specific occupational illnesses like a straining of the right forefinger, which they used to type Morse code with; after all the horrific wounds he had seen, he could only laugh about this one as he saw in the first night of the New Year.
Germain D’Esparbès spent New Year’s Eve writing yet another despondent letter which began with ‘Dearest Zoë’ and ended with ‘Tell Nana I’m not a monster. I’m still waiting for you, but with a loaded pistol at my side.’
Fritz Krupp spent New Year’s Eve sitting in a prototype of a plane, the Aviatik B.I. He fell in love with it as if it were a woman, and could hardly wait to fly and attack Paris with it in 1915. He fondled the machine-gun and said to himself: ‘I’ll kill you, Picasso, I’m telling you.’
Like maestro Huis, Private Stefan Holm also couldn’t remember where and with whom he saw in the New Year 1915.
Yıldız Effendi couldn’t help but be amazed that the streets of Istanbul were so deserted. Shoppers were few and far between, starving dogs wandered the streets, and on the opposite side of the Golden Horn someone was always lighting fires, whose acrid smoke crept across the water to enter his nostrils, even here on his side of the estuary. On the day of the infidel New Year he didn’t even think it was a special date.
On 1 January by the new Gregorian calendar, a wave of cold descended on the whole of Europe. On 1 January by the Julian calendar, an oily sun rose and fought against the low, waxen clouds on the horizon. On the Eastern Front, the German, Austrian and Russian armies fortified their positions from Riga to Chernivtsi; on the Western Front, the French, British and German armies dug in from Ostend to Mulhouse; on the Southern Front,